Mormon fundamentalism

Ties that bind, religion, the opiate of the masses, is the source of the confusion at Malheur.

Brand Thornton, 63, holding a shofar, made from an animal horn. He appeared at the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff in Nevada blowing the horn with a rifle strapped to his shoulder. Public records put Thornton in the Las Vegas area. His Facebook page says he owns Just Companies Inc., identified on Angie’s List as a heating and air conditioning company. Oregonian photo & caption info.

According to an interview with Brand Thornton, the occupier with the shofar,* <http://homebrave.com/home-of-the-brave//absolutely-god-told-us-to-do-this> there is “a handful of trusted individuals” in the inner circle who see Ammon as the group’s “spiritual leader….” They share his apocalyptic vision. Thornton cites chapter & verse of “Doctrines & Covenants” to justify their interpretation of the Constitution, which many Mormons view as a divinely inspired document that, like the Holy Bible, is improved with latter-day revelation.

Thornton claims to have experienced group revelation with the “trusted individuals.”

The outer circles of gun-toting “militia” are Ammon’s tools. Read the Book of Alma, 17 ff. These guys are preparing for a Holy War.

I wonder if the established Church of Latter-Day Saints, based in Salt Lake City, has an intervention squad to deal with this sort of apostasy. This is a problem with religions that encourage followers to pursue their own conversations with the divine. Joseph Smith and other authorized prophets of the church dealt harshly with such “false” prophets.

*The shofar was blown when Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbing down. The shofar was commonly taken to war so the troops would know when a battle would begin. The person who blew the shofar would call out to the troops from atop a hill. The troops could hear the call from their positions because of shofar’s distinct sound.

Underlying Ross’ analysis, which sticks with the power of words, is an implicit question: What actions would the government have taken if the those who have taken over the federal wildlife preserve were black?

Well, the Portland Oregonian, which has been providing some of the most complete coverage of the Malheur occupation, has provided an answer. The Oregonian’s Joseph Rose put together an excellent roundup, with photos (some below), of how authorities have responded to other occupations of federal property.

Rose details a 1979 incident in Georgia. A group of descendents of slaves, in an act of civil disobedience, camped on land where some of their grandparents had been kicked out in 1942.

FBI agents forcibly remove black protesters from a tent during a 1979 camp-in at Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. government had seized the property in 1942 from descendants of former slaves. (Emory University/Lewis H. Beck Center)

Although on the Georgia coast and much smaller, like Malheur, the Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge is a mix of wetlands and farmland whose ownership has been disputed since the 19th century. Unlike Malheur, the Harris Neck “squatters” were unarmed and black, attempting to reclaim refuge land, which was being leased by a white county commissioner to graze his cattle.

Children play at the 1979 camp-in at the Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge on the Georgia coast. The U.S. government seized the property from the descendants of former slaves in 1942. (Emory Univ.)

The farce continues. I hope someone is working on a musical comedy about all of this….

Kenneth Medenbach, 62, of Crescent, Oregon, was arrested Friday shortly after noon at the Safeway in Burns for “unauthorized use of a motor vehicle” reported by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stolen from the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

photos: Thomas Boyd | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Medenbach had been released from custody in Medford on condition that he would not “occupy” any federal property. He’d been convicted of illegally camping on federal property, where he’d attempted to protect the site with trip-wires and explosives. State police were taking him to Bend to be booked into the Deschutes County jail on a class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Bail was to be set at $10,000.

There has been no explanation for why the driver of a FWS van recovered from the Safeway lot has not been detained.

Medenbach at another USFWS pickup whose agency logo had been obliterated.

The pickup from which Medenback was aprehended had been “rebranded” with new stickers that read “Harney County Resource Center” covering the U.S. Fish and Wildlife logos.

According to the Oregonian’s Les Zaitz, who has been covering the Malheur militia shenanigans,

One of the best pieces to come out of the occupation at the Malheur wildlife sanctuary is a warning from wildlife photographer Kevin Vang, writing on Daily KOS as Norwegian Chef:

Just a friendly warning from the birding and wildlife photography community to the Oregon terrorists. We are watching your every move, and we have been watching you for a long time. And yes absolutely you are domestic terrorists of the worst kind, and the truth about your decades of constant poaching of protected wildlife around Malheur and other wildlife refuges, national parks, national forests and BLM lands has been well-documented. For years those of us who are wildlife photographers, birdwatchers and carers of wildlife, have been documenting the activities of you poachers and criminals around many of our nation’s wildlife refuges. With our powerful cameras, and ability to move unseen in the wilderness, we have found and documented your illegal hunts, your illegal traps and all sorts of illicit activities, and are constantly feeding that information to law enforcement, and we have finally got many of you poachers on the run and into jails. And I for one am a westerner sick to death of you welfare queens and cheats living off of BLM land, illegally gutting our wilderness and our wildlife. Malheur, Hart Mountain, Klamath Marsh, Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite etc etc, they all belong to us, we the American people, and no small group of armed thugs is going to destroy the great wildlife and national park system that our great Republican President Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir put in place over a century ago. Wildlife photographers and wildlife/bird watchers now number some 40 million people in the USA, and feed many rural western economies with our tourism dollars, and we will not stand for your sedition.

As Oregon’s Congressman Earl Blumenauer just stated, “Armed insurrection is terrorism. The situation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge shouldn’t be allowed to fester but should be dealt with firmly, swiftly and fairly. The continued disruption to the community of Burns and occupation of a federal facility is unacceptable. Those involved should be arrested and prosecuted”

Those of us who are international wildlife and nature photographers regularly face charging elephants, attacking lions and grizzlies, hidden crocodiles, massive storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the hottest, coldest and windiest conditions, and all kinds of poisonous snakes and bugs in our work, and we know the outdoors and wilderness from desert to jungle to sea to mountain to tundra from pole to equator better than any poacher or criminal or yee-haw yokel ever will, and we are not afraid to protect it. We have a just fear of nature from experience, but we don’t fear you gun-toting thugs in the least. You will never see us, but we and our cameras will always see you. We will #takebackmalheur from you terrorists, and will not rest until every one of you thugs and poachers is behind bars where they belong. You may think that your communities support you, but the majority do not and as many as support you, many more despise you, and your every move is being documented in great detail. The birding networks are ablaze right now about everything going on in Malheur. We know the nearby trailer park, who is supplying you with food, and a tourist boycott of them is already in the works for all birders for this upcoming bird season. We know who everyone is coming in and out, and why, and every shred of information is going straight to law enforcement and across every birding network in America.

And for those of us who are also lawyers (I for example just happen to have a law degree of U of Oregon), whether the Feds prosecute you or not (and we will do all in our power to ensure they do), we will put every civil suit against you and God knows you have given us plenty to work with, so you will know once and for all that your odious actions have real consequences.

We stand now and forever with wildlife, and you seditionists and terrorists are about to find out that’s there is a natural law of karma that vindictive people, who go out and poach innocent animals, will never be able to outrun or hide from.

We are watching you and our years of birding photography have made us endlessly patient and determined.

It was a couple guys like Kevin Vang who were largely responsible for establishment of the refuge in the first place, more than a century ago.

Wildlife photographer and naturalist William L. Finley and his childhood friend and photography partner, Herman T. Bohlman, visited the lake to investigate recovery of egret populations. The “white heron” had been wiped out a dacade earlier by plume hunters. The pair’s hand-colored photos and the backing of the Oregon Audubon Society helped convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to create the Lake Malheur reservation “as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”

A flock of Caspian terns takes flight in this hand-colored 1908 photo.

Finley photographs a nest as Bohlman maneuvers their boat through the shallows of Lake Malheur.

Finley estimated that several thousand birds had been killed so their feathers could be used to decorate hats.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was aptly named; since the mid-19th century, the area has been the scene of tragedy, adversity and misfortune—meanings of malheur, the name some trappers applied after disappearance of their cache. I don’t know for sure about the several thousands of years when native Americans roamed, hunted, fished and farmed the area—before they were rounded up and moved away—but I’d bet they had their share of bad times here long before Europeans arrived.

For the past week or so, I’ve been commenting and posting information on my Facebook page about the ongoing occupation of the national bird sanctuary near Burns, Oregon, a couple hundred miles from my Boise, Idaho, home.

I thought it might be useful, or at least entertaining, to collect those posts here, along with the many links to other information and background about the militia takeover and some of those involved. I have long been interested in the power of agreement, a phrase I picked up from Paul Crockett, the desert sage who rescued several people from the Manson “family” in the late 1960s.

I am fascinated by the ways some among us are able, occasionally, to awaken from what Gurdjieff likened to the early stages of hypnosis, in which he found the vast majority of humans almost all of the time. We are terribly vulnerable and quite susceptible to having others shape what we consider to be the “real” world.

So, here goes the collection of my thoughts, and others’, about the events unfolding not far from here, in reverse chronological order—moving from recent to earlier events and postings.

Wednesday, Jan. 13

Mix Heather, Sage, and Boyle—what a brew:

Reps. Boyle, Dixon and Scott, speak out about their visit to Burns protest

Tuesday, Jan. 12

A picture worth a thousand words:

A man dressed as continental army officer walks through the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Sunday, near Burns, Ore. A small, armed group has been occupying a remote national wildlife refuge in Oregon to protest federal land use policies. You write the cutline. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

More details of the conspiracy leading up to the armed occupation of the Malheur NWR, followed by many eye-opening comments of both supporters & detractors:

Monday, Jan. 11

More backstory on the Hammonds’ and others’ law-breaking and intimidation of federal employees and their families in Harney County, Oregon. While there are a few minor inaccuracies in this story, it paints a pretty clear picture of a problem that has been festering there for decades. The Bundys are not the first troublemakers to target the area. Most of the article was published in the “Village Voice” in the mid-1990s:

According to the Oregonian, Idaho state legislators Judy Boyle, Heather Scott and Sage Dixon were among a half-dozen out-of-state lawmakers who met with the Bundy gang on a “fact-finding mission” Saturday.

Beware the righteous man doing the bidding of his God.

Ammon Bundy tells how the Lord directed him: “I did exactly what he Lord asked me to do….I was to call all these people together….to participate in this wonderful thing that the Lord is about to accomplish.”

…and, oh, so, so sincere….

Ammon Bundy: Dear Friends, If we do not stand we will have nothing to pass on.

To folks who might think these kinds of beliefs are harmless, I strongly recommend Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.”

and…

Friday, Jan. 8

The book of ‘Alma,’ chapters 17 ff, in the ‘Book of Mormon’ may offer clues to Ammon Bundy’s behavior.

Is he living out a convoluted interpretation of the life of his namesake? In Joseph Smith’s story, Ammon goes to the land of Ishmael, where he sees his chance to use the Lord’s power to win the hearts of the Lamanites. Then they would listen to his teachings:

In addition to the church of “latter-day saints” based at Salt Lake City, there are 70-some other Mormon sects. At least one fundamentalist group is based on the Arizona border, at Cedar City, Utah, where Ryan Bundy runs his construction company.

The Bundys’ seditious actions have been decried by the SLC church. To which Mormon Lord is Ammon Bundy listening?

LDS.org illustration

Jon Krakauer, author of “Under the Banner of Heaven,” chimes in on the Bundys:

Laughter is the best medicine for the humorless jailbirds-to-be holed up at an Oregon bird sanctuary.

I like Robert Ehlert’s concluding comment of his editorial in today’s Idaho Statesman:

“The occupiers should take a clue from the tundra swans who visit in late fall and early winter at the refuge. They gather in the various ponds and their voices carry long distances. Though some stay, others know when it is time to move on.”

Here is a link to an extended quotation from Bill Kittredge’s “Owning It All,” which captures the essence of the confusion about property that propels so much of the current anti-government, take-“back”-the-land nonsense:

Tuesday, Jan. 5

While Idaho militia leaders appear wisely not to be supporting the Ranch Dividians at the Malheur [Misfortune/Bad Luck] Refuge, Idaho politicians may agree with the ends if not the means of the occupation:

I’ve read most of what coming my way via cyber space about the occupation of the Fish and Wildlife Service National Wildlife Refuge in east-central Oregon. The main stream media obviously does not “get” goings on in the west, and seems to be unaware of certain aspects of American History.

For example, there is no such thing as a grazing right. Such a “right” simply does not exist. Ranchers may be authorized to graze livestock on public lands via a permit that comes with requirements and restrictions. Such a permit is a privilege to hold, not a right. It never was a right.

Another example is the effort underway to move federal lands — your lands and my lands — “back” to the states. The “back” part is myth. The states never had ownership of those lands, and most human inhabitants of western states do not support transfer of federal lands to the states.

The thing is the occupation of the refuge facilities has little — nothing, actually — to do with the ranching family that got crosswise with federal laws and has a history of same. The Hammonds are NOT what this illegal occupation of federally managed property is all about. I would hope the national media would start to dig a bit deeper to understand the thugs — the pawns — and dig still deeper to determine who the string pullers are.

To to understand more about the ranching family, who has distanced itself from the occupants of the refuge facility, here is a link from the U.S. Attorney of Oregon that I saw as a result of an e-mail message from a friend and past colleague, Carter Niemeyer:

Dean Gunderson: Calling the actions of these yee-hadists (forging a little cow-liphate in central Oregon) – “Occupy Malhuer” is a little offensive.
There’s very little connection between their actions and what the Occupy Movement did. Occupy was inherently non-violent, offering only passive resistance.

Monday, Jan. 4

Friend and former “Idaho Reports” host and colleague Marc Johnson opines on the Occupy Malheur foolishness in Oregon: